A Practical Guide

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To stream video with HLS, you need to divide your video into segments of a fixed duration and add them to a playlist. In the book I use Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming tools to do this. Here’s an example using mediafilesegmenter:

$ mediafilesegmenter -f /Library/WebServer/Documents/vod sample.mov

This command takes the video (sample.mov) and writes out the segments and the playlist to the /Library/WebServer/Documents/vod directory. Unfortunately, Apple’s tools will only work on a Mac.

However, recent versions of ffmpeg can also output HLS compatible files. Given a video as input, it will divide it into segments and create a playlist for us.

We use ffmpeg‘s segment muxer to segment the video. We can specify the segment duration with the -segment_time option. The last argument passed to ffmpeg is the path to where the segments should be written; it contains a format specifier (%d) similar to those supported by the printf function in C. The %d will be replaced with the current sequence number. In this example, the segments will be named fileSequence0.ts, fileSequence1.ts, and so on.

And that’s how you process a video for streaming with HLS using ffmpeg. There are other examples in the book, including how to use ffmpeg to segment a live video stream, so if you want to learn how, buy your copy today.

In part 2 we’ll look at how to segment video using ffmpeg’s hls muxer.

The following article is an excerpt from Chapter 4 of HTTP Live Streaming: A Practical Guide. This is the introductory section of the chapter and is meant to give you the background you need to understand how adaptive streaming works and how to do it with HLS.

In previous chapters, we’ve seen how to stream a video with HLS for both on- demand and live video. However, a single video stream at a particular bit rate isn’t going to work on all the devices that people watch video on today. Some devices are more powerful than others, screen sizes are different, some support different H.264 profiles, and so on. Connection speeds can also vary depending on how you are connected to the internet.

For example, you can watch an HD video stream on your flat screen TV at home, but you won’t get the same experience watching the same stream on a mobile device over a cellular network. Playback will stall as the device won’t be able to download the video data fast enough. In some cases, the video may not play at all because the device won’t be powerful enough to decode the video. Then there’s the wasted bandwidth. Most screens on mobile devices do not have the same resolution as a TV so all those pixels will be wasted.

The amount of bandwidth available also plays a part. Your internet provider may promise you super-fast connection speeds, but what you actually get may fluctuate at any given time. If everybody in your neighbourhood starts streaming the latest movie from Netflix or watching YouTube videos, you can be fairly certain that your connection speed will drop off. The result? More stalls and buffering.

We need a solution that allows us to deliver a video stream that’s optimal for the device the stream is being watched on, and that is where adaptive streaming comes in to play.

Here’s the plan for what we’ll cover in this chapter:

First we’ll look at what adaptive streaming is, how it works, and why it’s useful.

Then you’ll learn how to take a video and stream it on-demand using adaptive streaming.

We’ll be doing some video encoding in this chapter so if you come across any terms you aren’t familiar with, refer to Appendix A, An Encoding Primer.